Mrchchakatikam, or The Clay Toy-Cart, is a work almost unique in Sanskrit literature, a work of drama as renowned for its ingenious plotting and memorable characters as it is for the mystery that shrouds the identity of its author.
The very title is unusual; plays in Sanskrit are usually named after the principal character(s) or else the main event in the story. Further, the play boasts not only an unusually complex hero, the impoverished brahmin merchant Charudatta who is dutiful and impulsive and generous to a fault, but also a unique heroine, the beautiful cultured, progressive and fiercely independent courtesan, Vasantasena. By naming his play Mrchchakatikam, Shudraka indicates right at the outset that the clay toy-cart—which appears only at the beginning of Act VI—forms the pivotal agent of suspense in this gripping tale of love, political intrigue, violent crime and social commentary.
The titular cart is introduced, quietly and cleverly, in a rather poignant scene: Rohasena, the young son of Charudatta, is found crying for a golden cart, just like the one his playmate has. He refuses to play with the toy-cart that the maid Radanika has made for him. Vasantasena, watching the scene, is overwhelmed with pity and tenderness. She at once removes her jewellery, fills the toy-cart with it and hands it over to the child, telling him that he can now have his own gold cart made out of her jewels. This small episode will set into motion a dramatic sequence of events with grievous repercussions; Rohasena’s seemingly innocent toy-cart thus earns its stripes as an apt title for Shudraka’s play.
Nonetheless, to fully understand this play’s iconic status in the Sanskrit canon as well as to grasp what makes it so fascinating and complex, it would be both useful and revealing to contextualize it first within the broader framework of Sanskrit drama.
In the Natyashastra of Bharata there is an account of the origin of natya, or drama. According to it, when the Krita Yuga ended and the Treta Yuga began, vulgarity, unruly passions, greed, confusion born of jealousy, and anger also made an appearance, leading to flawed happiness, pleasures having become mixed with pain. Indra, the leader of the devas, approached Brahma, it is said, and asked him for a kridaniyaka, a plaything, good for the eyes and good for the ears. Indra wished Brahma to create a new Veda, a fifth one meant for all the people, including the lower orders. Brahma, the knower of Truth, agreed and, meditating upon the four Vedas, created the Natya Veda, full of the import of the scriptures, conducive to righteousness, wealth and glory as well as to the development of all the arts and crafts. He introduced historical tales as well as instructions for future generations of mankind by drawing on the various elements of the Vedas, such as the recitative texts from the Rig Veda, the music from the Sama Veda, the acting from the Yajur Veda, and emotions and sentiments from the Atharva Veda. Having created the Natya Veda, Brahma gave it to Indra saying that he had created the historical tales too to be used for production with the help of the gods (G.K. Bhat, Bharata-Natya-Manjari: A Selection from Bharata’s Natyasastra, ‘Origin of the Natyaveda’, pp. 4–6; Introduction, p. 1).
Discounting the hand of Brahma, Bharata is quite close to the truth when he talks of the natya as born out of the elements found in the four Vedas and nourished into maturity by the rich tales of the Itihasas or the epics and the Puranas, including the cult of Vishnu–Krishna.
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In a few of the hymns of the Rig Veda, fifteen in number according to A.B. Keith, there are dialogues, such as the one between King Pururavas and Urvashi in which the king chides the apsara for her inconstancy, no doubt to prevent her from leaving him, an attempt in which he fails; or the one carried on by Sage Agastya with his wife Lopamudra and their son. It is very likely that in the recitation of these hymns different individuals would have spoken the words of the different participants of the conversation (A.B. Keith, The Sanskrit Drama, p. 14).
However, there is something enigmatic about these dialogue hymns; strangely the traditional interpreters of Vedic literature like Sayana (a thirteenth-century commentator) seem to be at a loss to understand the ritual purpose of these dialogue hymns. Perhaps they were never recited in the actual performance of any ritual; perhaps they were just a different form of poetry which disappeared in later Vedic times.
It was Max Müller, the great Indologist, who brought at least one of these dialogue hymns back into relevance, the one in which there is a dispute between Indra and the Maruts, the wind deities (Rig Veda,1.165). Indra accuses the Maruts of deserting him in the fight against the demon Vrtra. The Maruts, however, succeed in placating Indra in the end. Müller believed that this hymn was not only repeatedly recited at the sacrifices in honour of the Maruts but it might even have been acted out by two groups, one representing Indra and the other the Maruts, all as part of the ritual (The Sanskrit Drama, p. 15). Perhaps we have here the earliest tentative beginnings of Sanskrit drama.
We are on firmer ground in the rituals of the Yajur Veda. In the meticulous performance of these rituals, accompanied by elaborate ceremonies, complex dramatic representation became noticeable. The rituals demanded more than mere singing of songs or recitations in praise of the deities; it required the participants to assume different parts, take on identities other than their own. Consider, for instance, the episode of buying soma for the soma sacrifice. The soma seller is not paid his price but instead pelted with clods of earth miming the mythological episode of getting soma from its guardians, the gandharvas (celestial musicians) (The Sanskrit Drama, p. 23).
In the mahavrata, which is a ritual for increasing the power of the sun after the winter solstice (described in the Katha Aranyaka and the Aitareya Aranyaka), two men struggle with each other to get at a round piece of white leather no doubt symbolizing the sun. Of the two participants one is ‘white’, an Aryan Vaishya, and the other ‘black’, a Shudra—the one symbolizing summer and the other, winter. The colour-coding should not offend us; it should be seen as a very early attempt at personification: the dark man standing for the darkness of winter days and the light-skinned man for the brightness of summer with a reinvigorated sun (The Sanskrit Drama, p. 4).
We know from the Sama Veda that music was quite developed in Vedic times. It is known even in the Rig Veda that women adorned themselves and danced for plentiful rain, prosperity and also to attract lovers. From the Atharva Veda we know that men sang and danced to music. Therefore what we can be certain about on the whole is that there were elaborate rituals with dramatic spectacles thrown in, all completely sacerdotal in character. The priests might have taken on the roles of gods and rishis to mime heavenly events on earth (The Sanskrit Drama p. 16). Yet, these spectacles fell far short of the classical art form, the theatre; the object of the performance was not aesthetic pleasure but a magical benefit accruing to the performers which might improve their lot in life.
Then we come to the epics. Both the Ramayana and the Mahabharata carry the terms nata and nartaka in their text but there is no reason to believe that they indicated anything more than pantomimists. But the recitation of the epics itself was very popular and seems to have contributed to the development of the drama. The reciters were often divided into two groups: the pathakas and the dharakas; the former recited the poem and the latter explained it in the Prakritam (dialect) of that particular district (The Sanskrit Drama, pp. 28–29). More importantly, the epics which were a treasure house of wonderful tales, both mythological and historical, gave an impetus to the dramatization of the events contained in those tales. That this really took place has been borne out in the work of grammarians.
Although Panini, the well-known Sanskrit grammarian who probably lived in the fourth century BC, refers in his work to the Natasutras meant for the natas or the ‘actors’, there is again no certainty that the nata was really an actor and not a mere pantomimist. But a couple of centuries later, in the Mahabhashya of Patanjali, the well-known commentary on the Ashtadhyayi of Panini, there is evidence to accept that drama had taken a few more steps forward in its development. Patanjali, in the context of criticizing a ruling of his predecessor Katyayana regarding the use of the imperfect tense, averred that in his own time it was permitted to describe an event that had occurred long ago, from one’s personal point of view, as if it had taken place before his very eyes. The examples that he gives are very interesting: ‘Vasudeva has slain Kamsa’; ‘he causes the death of Kamsa’; ‘he causes the binding of Bali’. These events took place, if at all, long ago, so how could the imperfect or the present tense be used for them? Patanjali justifies these statements not as representations of the actual deeds done in the remote past but as contemporary descriptions of those events, which might be done in three ways or modes. In the first mode, men called shauhbhikas (literally, conjurers) stage in front of the spectators, without using any words, an event that might have happened long ago, but one the audience would now see as actually taking place in front of their eyes, such as Krishna killing Kamsa or the binding of Bali. The second mode was to portray those events in paintings showing, for example, Kamsa being beaten and carried away. In the third mode, there were those similar to the actors who used words to describe the event in such a way as to make it real to the audience. This last mode came very close to drama as the speakers would again form two groups, one representing Krishna and the other Kamsa or any other character in opposition to Krishna or any other hero; they even went to the extent of donning differently coloured garments, like red for Krishna, and black for Kamsa (The Sanskrit Drama, p. 34). It is interesting to note that such drama-like activities seemed to be taking place at this time in a secular context and not necessarily as part of a religious ritual.
As for secular influences on the development of drama, some scholars believe that the puppet show, well known in India, could have played a part; the sutradhara, literally, ‘the holder of the string’, a very important character in Sanskrit theatre, who introduces the play and its author to the audience, could have evolved out of the earlier puppeteer, who manipulated the strings and moved the dolls.
Did Greek drama have an effect on Sanskrit drama? The dramatic art in Greece had reached a high level of sophistication in the mid- and later centuries of the first millennium BC and Greek influence was seen in Indian art to a significant extent. But as far as drama was concerned the influence was probably minimal. The spirit that informed Greek drama was totally different from that of Sanskrit drama. Indian dramaturgy did not allow tragedies on the stage while some of the finest Greek plays were tragedies.
Sanskrit drama developing from such varied beginnings, assimilating sacred and secular influences, attained maturity and excellence in the early centuries of the Christian era. A text on dramaturgy giving extensive and exhaustive rules and explanations on all aspects of the performing arts, music, dance and drama, including descriptions of various kinds of stages and playhouses, a text that seems to have had a long period of evolution, made its appearance in an almost complete form around this time. This text bore the name Natyashastra and was ascribed to one Bharata.
Bharata opens his work, as we have already seen, with the story of the creation of the Natya Veda by Brahma; he further says that at the command of Brahma and the request of the sages he, Bharata, properly arranged the work to facilitate ease of study and performance.
As to who Bharata really was there is no definite opinion. Many students of the Natyashastra believe that Bharata is just a mythical figure like Vyasa or Manu. Those who disagree insist that he was quite real and probably belonged to a Vedic tribe; or he might have been of non-Aryan origin belonging possibly to a family of artists. Many also hold that despite the contradictions, repetitions and haphazard arrangement of the material, there is a unity of theme in the work which argues for a single author which could very well have been someone called Bharata. On balance, however, the material and mode of presentation support the thesis that the work was put together at different times by different hands, no doubt keeping pace with the development of the art itself.
There are several opinions with regard to the date of completion of the Natyashastra as well; of them two seem worth considering. According to one school an original work called Rasasutra with material on music must have existed as early as 200 BC. The rest of the material was incorporated and shaped into the present form by the third or fourth century AD. The other school thinks that the work in the present form already existed in 200 AD and might have existed as early as 100 BC (G.K. Bhat, Bharata-Natya-Manjari, pp. 1–4).
The first Sanskrit poets of note were Ashvaghosha and Bhasa of whom the former is better known as the author of the kavya, or long poem, Buddhacharita than as a playwright, for only one of his plays has survived and that too in fragments. Bhasa, on the other hand, was long considered a very skilful dramatist on whom glowing praise had been showered by great writers like Kalidasa, Bana and others; yet he remained little more than a name to modern scholars until the discovery of thirteen of his plays as late as 1913 in Kerala. It is clear from the plays that Bhasa was acquainted with the Natyashastra, if not in its present form then at least as a prototype that existed earlier; it is also evident that he did not follow all the strictures laid down in the treatise, indicating he was original in his thinking and quite different from other playwrights.
Bhasa’s dates are difficult to ascertain. Kalidasa mentions Bhasa along with Somilla and Kaviputra, two other playwrights, in superlative terms in the prologue of his play Malavikagnimitram. As Kalidasa’s date has now been established to be around 400 AD, Bhasa could not have lived later than 350 AD. All this is rather relevant because among the plays of Bhasa there is one of four acts called Charudattam which is almost the same as the first four acts of Mrchchakatikam. This factor has to be taken into account in fixing the date of Mrchchakatikam and its author.
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It is a strange feature of Sanskrit literature that there is no work of tragedy to be found in it. Sanskrit drama, although of high literary and technical standard, has not a single tragedy comparable to the Greek or Shakespearean tragedies. The conflict between man and the external world leading finally to man’s destruction seems to be a theme abhorrent to the Indian sense of the fitness of things. Several reasons have been advanced to explain this phenomenon.
It is said, for instance, that in the Indian concept of life a man is endowed with not just one life but many in succession and the sorrows experienced in one life may be amply compensated for with happiness in future lives. Therefore no adverse situation in life carries with it a sense of tragic finality—a fact of life that is reflected in literature, especially in drama.
It is further argued that tragedy strikes only the individual. In the Indian metaphysical scheme man as an individual is unreal as he is in truth Brahman, the Supreme Spirit, and the suffering of the individual is illusory and superficial and carries no poignancy. A.B. Keith concludes that as it was the same brahmana mind which postulated the metaphysics, that has also been responsible for most other literary productions, it is no wonder that there is no tragedy portrayed in any form of creative literature in Sanskrit including drama.
Historically, perhaps the reason lies in the origin and development of the art itself. The material for the early productions was always taken from the epics and the proliferating Krishna legends. The heroes were invariably divine, like Krishna himself, and always victorious, as in the episodes of the killing of Kamsa and the binding of Bali. Such early presentations were specifically directed towards the glorification of the divine heroes. Naturally then, tragedy befalling the hero had no place in these productions.
In the course of time drama as an art developed and became more sophisticated in presentation and stagecraft but the dramatized material continued to be the same, although it was now much more skilfully written and presented. In addition dramatic theory bolstered the practice of making the heroes invincible. Bharata, in the Natyashastra, while talking of four kinds of heroes, makes their differences lie only in their personal traits; basically they are all dhira, that is noble, exalted and valiant. Failure and tragedy are incompatible with such heroes.
Furthermore, an exalted hero is one whose greatness in the present life is assured by all of his meritorious deeds done in his previous lives and nothing and nobody has the power to diminish his prowess or bring about his downfall.
Moreover, Indian writers believe the purpose of all art and literature, especially dramatic art, is the creation of multiple sentiments or emotions in the audience of which only one may be dominant. In a play, or a natakam, there may be the delineation of three or four emotional states, the foremost generally being romance, assisted by valour, or heroism, and wonderment. Certain setbacks are introduced in the career of the hero in order to generate in the audience feelings of anxiety, sorrow and compassion, constituting the sentiment of pathos. When the play ends on a happy note, with all the conflicts resolved for the hero and heroine, the audience, having experienced a gamut of emotions, is at peace after enjoying a very good performance. Stark tragedy, which leaves a hero beaten, has no place in this scheme, although pathos has its allotted role to play.
Interestingly, Bharata makes a distinction between ‘productive rasas’ (utpatti-hetu), which are shringara (romance), raudra (fury), vira (valour) and bibhatsa (disgust), and ‘produced rasas’ (utpadya), which include hasya (comical), karuna (pathos), adbhuta (wonder) and bhayanaka (fearful). Bharata seems to suggest that while the utpatti rasas may dominate the play, utpadya rasas like karuna and others may not, although they could appear as phases in the course of the story of the drama (Bharata-Natya-Manjari, Introduction, p. xx).
When we begin an analysis of the play Mrchchakatikam, the first problem that faces us is the identity of the generally acknowledged author, Shudraka, a mysterious figure believed to have been a king who finds wide mention in Sanskrit literature.
Who was Shudraka?
The Kathasaritsagara (a volume of folk tales of India collected and rendered from the original Prakritam into Sanskrit by Somadeva of Kashmir in the eleventh century AD) speaks of the ruler Shudraka whose capital was at Vardhamana (a city variously identified with Burdwan in Bengal, Vadhwana in Kathiawar and another place situated between Allahabad and Benares). According to the Kathasaritsagara, a brahmana sacrificed his own life to save Shudraka’s who was then blessed with a lifespan of a hundred years.
Banabhatta, the seventh-century writer, also mentions King Shudraka in his work. In Kadambari, his well-known prose work, King Shudraka is none other than the hero Chandrapida himself in one of his births taken to expiate a curse. Bana describes him as an extremely talented man and an exemplary ruler of Vidisha. Dandin too, belonging more or less to the same period, describes in the Dashakumaracharitam Shudraka’s adventures in many lives. The poets Somilla and Ramila, who were probably contemporaries or near contemporaries of Bhasa, have been credited with a Shudrakakatha which indicates that Shudraka might already have gained a somewhat mythical status in their times.
Within Mrchchakatikam, in the Prologue, we get a full description of the poet-king: handsome, valiant, scholarly, well versed in the Vedas, proficient in mathematics, a brahmana who lived to be a hundred years and ten days old and then ‘entered the fire’ after placing his son on the throne. It is not clear whether ‘entering the fire’ means some kind of a supernatural occurrence or simply a cremation. The verses that describe Shudraka in this Prologue are possibly a later addition or intentionally put in by the author himself, whoever he may have been.
Such references seem only to suggest that Shudraka the king may just be a legendary figure. Adding force to this suggestion is the fact that the Puranas, which provide long lists of kings, make no mention at all of a king named Shudraka. On the other hand, the play must have an author, a man of flesh and blood, belonging very much to history, who may or may not have been a king but who, for reasons unfathomable, has thought it fit to assume the name Shudraka as his nom de plume.
Some scholars try to place him in history by giving a partly autobiographical interpretation to the play Mrchchakatikam. One such opinion identifies Shudraka with Shivadatta, the Abhira prince who or whose son founded the Chedi dynasty around 248–249 AD by defeating the last of the Andhra kings. They see a parallel between the above and the overthrowing of King Palaka of Ujjayini by Aryaka, the son of a cowherd in the play. The Abhiras were, by and large, herdsmen.
Then there is an attempt to connect Shudraka to a very early dynasty that ruled Ujjayini. The names Gopala, Palaka and Aryaka are in fact of ancient origin, dating back to the time of the Buddha. Pradyota Mahasena of Ujjayini was the founder of the Pradyota dynasty and a contemporary of the Buddha. He had two sons, Gopala and Palaka. On the death of their father, Gopala surrendered the kingdom to Palaka; the latter was ousted subsequently by Aryaka, the son or the grandson of Gopala. These incidents are part of legendary history and thus well known, the story having even entered the Brihadkatha. It would be too far-fetched to place Shudraka as far back as the fifth century BC to fulfil the demands of an autobiographical play. There are some other difficulties as well in assigning such an early date because some of the conditions described by the author as prevailing in Ujjayini belong to a much later date for instance, the strong and wide prevalence of Buddhism as indicated by the presence of three Buddhist monks in the city and Charudatta making Samvahaka the head of all the monasteries in the kingdom; a reference to Chanakya found in the play would be out of place as well as he lived in the fourth century BC. Obviously it is more prudent to assume that Shudraka, writing much later, simply made use of the story and the names to construct his own political plot with some modifications.
In Mrchchakatikam, there is no mention either of a brother of the king named Gopala or that brother’s son. Gopaladaraka, as the dramatist refers to Aryaka, clearly means the son of a gopala, a cowherd. It therefore appears logical to assume that having borrowed the outline of a palace intrigue, unseemly but common enough between siblings, from history, Shudraka has managed to convert it into the much more momentous story of the overthrowing of a tyrant quick to anger and given to strange fancies like shaving off young brides’ hair, as we read in the first act of Mrchchakatikam. He lets his brother-in-law, the unsavoury Shakara, run roughshod over everybody including the court officers. The tyrant is overthrown by the people, under the leadership of a cowherd, who has supporters among the ordinary people as well as the power of divine prophecy to sustain him.
Now comes the important question of whether Shudraka wrote the entire play himself or borrowed the four-act Charudattam ascribed to Bhasa and built his political and crime plots over it. Charudattam, essentially a romance, ends abruptly after Vasantasena frees her cheti Madanika from bondage, hands her over to her lover Sajjalaka (Sharvilaka in Mrchchakatikam) and sends them off in her carriage. The rest of the fourth act shows the handiwork of Shudraka for that is where the political subplot kicks in with the public announcement by the officers of the king about the capture and escape of the cowherd boy Aryaka. For Shudraka to use Bhasa’s work as a base to construct his political and crime plots on, we have to give him a date later than 300–350 AD. It is relevant in this connection that while Kalidasa heaps praises on Bhasa, he does not mention Shudraka at all in his work.
One school of thought believes that Mrchchakatikam is the original play out of which Charudattam was merely excerpted for performance on the stage. This idea is not as outlandish as it sounds. All of Bhasa’s plays discovered in the early 1900s are their stage versions preserved by the Chakyars, the professional actors of Kerala. So it would appear that there is no necessity to place Shudraka after Bhasa. Dr V.V. Mirasi who espouses this view actually places Shudraka around the middle of the second century AD. The opposing school of thought of course sticks to their view that the author of Mrchchakatikam simply borrowed what justifiably seemed to him an unfinished fragment as it ends rather abruptly and has no bharatavakyam at the end (the last stanzas in a play recited in honour of Bharata muni) and wrote it up into a prakaranam of ten acts. However, the absence of the bharatavakyam can also be explained by the fact that it is a fragment after all, abstracted from Mrchchakatikam for purposes of stage presentation and that being so why should it contain the bharatavakyam?
As regards the identity of the playwright there is strong opinion in favour of conferring the honour on the poet Dandin. Several reasons have been advanced to support this thesis. In the first place the name Shudraka seems to have been well known among the poets of the sixth and seventh centuries, as Dandin is believed to have lived in the hundred years between 550 and 650 AD. It is further believed that the author of Mrchchakatikam may have hailed from the south as terms characteristic of south India are found in the work; some of the Prakritams used also have a southern ring to them. The police officer Chandanaka talks of karnatakalahaprayoga and also refers to several southern peoples by their name. It is known that Dandin was a southerner hailing in fact from Kanchipuram. Similarities of thoughts and expressions, it is stated, are observed in the Dashakumaracharitam, a prose work by Dandin, and Mrchchakatikam. It may be mentioned in this connection that in the Dashakumaracharitam one comes across a treatise on thieving ascribed to one Karnisutha very similar to the treatise by Kanakashakti figuring in Mrchchakatikam. Certain expressions like kanelimata indicate a later rather than an earlier date. Mrchchakatikam bears similarities to plays like Nagananda, belonging to the age of Harsha in the depiction of scenes of violence on the stage, such as Vasantasena being thrashed by Shakara and left for dead in the garden, the condemned Charudatta in gruesome attire being dragged to the execution ground and Dhuta preparing for self-immolation. It is therefore concluded by some scholars that it is Dandin, who lived between 550 and 650 AD, who is the author of Mrchchakatikam. If this were true, why does he hide behind a pen name, something he never does with his other known works? Is this because he has borrowed so heavily from another poet-dramatist?
The general reader may add his own opinion to the list. Let us assume that ‘Shudraka’ was just a resident of the city of Ujjayini of the sixth or seventh century, a merchant perhaps, who lived in one of the mansions in the merchants’ square. Rich or poor, he knew the ways of the world, the way the dharmashastra—the law of the land—worked, the strengths and the weaknesses of the ruler and various other facets of city life. It was a mark of his erudition that he was familiar with the plays of Bhasa. Learned and commanding a good turn of phrase in Sanskrit and having found Charudattam a bit pointless as well as incomplete and well aware of the possibilities present in the fragment, he pepped it up by making a real villain and perpetrator out of the ludicrous and strutting figure of the king’s brother-in-law. Yet there remained loose ends. What would be the future of the impoverished merchant Charudatta? Gentle, noble and refined as he was, a man held in high esteem by the city, would he have lived on the wealth of a courtesan? Would Vasantasena have continued to be bound by the rules and regulations of courtesan life? The reader will note that Shudraka solved these problems brilliantly by the introduction of a third political plot running behind the scenes as it were, contributing to a successful denouement that amply satisfied the literary demands of the dramatic art as well as the emotions of the audience. Having thus developed the fragment into a full-fledged play the playwright decided in a flippant moment to father it on Shudraka, the mythical king of no mean talent.
Bharata in his Natyashastra lists ten kinds of dramatic presentations based on their length and the dominant emotions they seek to portray. Of these, the natakam and the prakaranam are the best known and the most popular as they both depict romantic love which is of universal appeal. Mrchchakatikam has been classified as a prakaranam.
The main difference that lies between the natakam and the prakaranam, according to Bharata, is that the natakam invariably picks its exalted hero and its plot from mythology, that is, from the epics and the Puranas, while the prakaranam deals with the lives of ordinary people and their problems. The hero of a prakaranam may be a brahmana, a minister, or a merchant, like Charudatta in Mrchchakatikam. What is important is that the story of a prakaranam should be of relevance to real life. Therefore it necessarily follows that the plot and the characters of the hero, the heroine and the subsidiary cast should be the original creations of the poet-dramatist (Bharata-Natya-Manjari, p. 128). The Sahityadarpana of Viswanatha echoes these sentiments.
It is further stated by Bharata that a prakaranam may be of two kinds—shuddha and sankirna, depending on whether the heroine is of noble birth or a courtesan. Mrchchakatikam falls into the second category with the courtesan Vasantasena as the heroine. While the ideal number of acts in a prakaranam is ten, any work over five acts is acceptable, provided the other conditions are fulfilled. Romantic love must be the dominant emotion delineated in the work. Mrchchakatikam fulfils most of these conditions admirably.
As a good example of a prakaranam, Mrchchakatikam abounds in a variety of characters all drawn from normal walks of life, each exhibiting an individuality rarely to be seen in any other work. There are no miracles in the play to rescue the hero and the heroine from difficult situations; there are no disembodied voices booming out of the skies comforting the protagonists in distress. The story moves with clever plotting, enabling the chief characters to come out of difficult situations so that the play ends on a happy note, all the while portraying the virtues and foibles of human beings.
A good prakaranam it may be, but the charge often brought against Mrchchakatikam is that it is merely a composite play, with many borrowed episodes from various sources put together. To begin with, there is the fact, although there are some differing opinions, that Shudraka built his work on the foundation laid by Bhasa. Add to this many other borrowings from various sources that may be ascribed to both Bhasa and Shudraka. For example, the idea of courtesans falling in love with poor but honest men is found in the Brihadkatha. Perhaps Bhasa took the basic idea from there. On the other hand courtesans getting married to poor but honest men in order to free themselves from the odium of their calling must have been a common enough occurrence and the dramatist could very well have taken that idea from life rather than any collection of stories. The Kathasaritsagara has the story of a gambler who having lost his money and being pursued by creditors takes refuge in an empty temple; it also has a description of the splendid house of a courtesan very similar to Vidushaka’s description of Vasantasena’s mansion. These minor episodic borrowings are easily pardonable as such stories must have been in circulation for a long time and it must have been the accepted practice for writers to make use of them as and when they fitted the context.
But was Shudraka justified in making unacknowledged use of the work of another poet? Bharata very clearly settles all doubts on the subject. He forbids only the use of material from the arshakavyas, works composed by rishis, to wit the two epics and the Puranas; the plot of a prakaranam should be the product of a human mind and as such may be borrowed from earlier poets so long as it is modified to suit the new dramatic construction (Bharata-Natya-Manjari, pp. 128–29).
Shudraka deserves to be forgiven for the use of the work of another poet because the fame of Mrchchakatikam rests squarely on the brilliance of the two parallel plots conceived by the dramatist and built over the first four acts. In the absence of these, the Charudattam of Bhasa would have remained merely yet another play of romantic love among many such found in Sanskrit literature. The twin plots of politics and criminal intrigue, apart from facilitating the progress of the main plot of romantic love, also heighten the element of suspense, creating in the process some unforgettable characters, not the least of whom is Shakara, a most consummate villain, perhaps the only one to be found in the entire gamut of Sanskrit literature.
The characters in Mrchchakatikam are drawn very skilfully and show great individuality and are true to life.
Traditionally the hero of a natakam or a prakaranam ought to be one of four kinds as mentioned in Bharata’s Natyashastra: the dhirodatta, the dhiroddhata, the dhiraprashanta and the dhiralalita, all of whom are similar in being dhira or noble-minded and brave and differ from each other only in their personal traits. The dhirodatta is exalted, the dhiroddhata is haughty and given to action, the dhiraprashanta is endowed with philosophic calm and the dhiralalita is full of grace, sportive and sensitive to beauty. Charudatta is generally labelled as a dhiraprashantanayaka as Bharata himself stipulates that a brahmana or a merchant hero be so presented.
Shudraka decides to exceed the limits imposed by this restrictive and simplistic label. Passivity—philosophic or otherwise—is not the only defining quality of our hero Charudatta. We have here a cultivated man, an aesthete with a deep appreciation of beauty wherever he finds it. He is highly responsive to the fine nuances of music; his appreciation of Rebhila’s music is as sensuous as it is scholarly. Further, he himself seems to be a practitioner of the art for does not Sharvilaka, the house-breaking thief, find a variety of musical instruments and treatises on music in Charudatta’s courtyard? And he falls instantly under the spell of Vasantasena’s exquisite beauty. Clearly, there is a lot more to Charudatta than what the label ‘dhiraprashantanayaka’ can convey. At the very least, even within the ambit of traditional criticism, it seems more comprehensive to define him as dhiraprashanta-dhiralalitanayaka.
As the play Mrchchakatikam unfolds, Charudatta hardly comes through as quite a textbook example of a stoic dhiraprashantanayaka. His philosophic calm deserts him every now and then; but precisely because of that his character comes alive with all its vulnerabilities, especially a deep sense of shame often giving expression to bitter complaints about his poverty and its attendant indignities. As the action proceeds it is Charudatta’s impulsiveness—the impulse to give—rather than philosophic calm that stands out as his distinguishing trait. Amazingly, even the dire poverty that has now become his lot does not curb that impulse. It is deeply touching to see him feeling the various limbs of his body every now and then for the non-existing ornaments to give someone or other in appreciation of some act of theirs.
While the impulse to give is intact there is no corresponding eagerness to try and regain his lost wealth or his lost position among the merchants of Ujjayini. The dhiraprashanta nature seems to take hold in a negative manner when it comes to putting in an effort to pull out of the mire of penury. Charudatta seems to be in the grip of an inexplicable ennui, with an exasperating tendency to let things ride and a conviction that things will not improve. This fatalism seems to run to all aspects of life. He falls in love with the most beautiful woman in the city, who ardently reciprocates his feelings, yet he seems only all too willing to sit back and accept that this love, born in such straitened circumstances, is only destined to wilt away in his own limbs as he puts it, like anger generated in a powerless person. He longs for her, admits that he spends all his evenings and sleepless nights in thoughts of her but takes no steps at all to court her. Finally, as the play nears its climax, in an extreme manifestation of fatalism he is even ready to be cut down ignominiously in the prime of his life.
But can we write Charudatta off as just a pessimistic, defeatist and lethargic non-hero? Far from it. Because there is uprightness in him and gentleness combined with a noble bearing that command our respect. For all his lamentations we see that there is an innate strength in him which makes him act with decision at critical junctures. The finest example of this strength is the unhesitating manner in which he decides to help Aryaka out of his terrible predicament, sparing no thought to the risk to himself or to his family.
The play finishes with all the loose ends adequately tied up, yet the audience is left with a niggling doubt: Will Charudatta be able to rise to his new responsibilities or is it only a matter of time before he finds himself back in queer street.
Vasantasena, the heroine, is a unique creation in Sanskrit literature. She is noble without having been born into nobility, a courtesan who has the bearing and elegance of a woman of aristocratic birth. When we meet her for the first time in the play, she has just done the uncharacteristic thing of falling in deep love with an impoverished brahmana merchant whose only wealth is his sterling qualities and physical beauty while she herself is being actively courted by the king’s own brother-in-law.
Vasantasena is unusual in other ways as well. Although normally she speaks Prakritam like all female characters in Sanskrit plays, including Sita and Shakuntala, there are several occasions in Mrchchakatikam when she switches over to Sanskrit with great ease. She shows literary abilities as well for we see her matching verse for verse with her Vita while walking in the rain to Charudatta’s house. Vasantasena is a talented painter too, as we see her drawing the portrait of her beloved Charudatta to alleviate the pangs of separation from him; the work wins her cheti Madanika’s approval as bearing a very good likeness to the original.
Unlike what conventional wisdom would have us believe of all courtesans, Vasantasena does not go after wealth; her astonishingly modern mind, aided by a deeply compassionate nature and social awareness, makes her an uncharacteristic courtesan with no greed at all for money. On the contrary she generously settles the debts of the indigent Samvahaka and sets Madanika free so that she can marry the man she is in love with. In fact Vasantasena would free all her bonded women without any payment if only she had the authority to do so.
She loves Charudatta passionately; and since he is a passive and reticent lover who is burdened with feelings of inadequacy due to his lack of wealth it is she who takes the initiative in keeping the flame burning by creating opportunities of being with him. She tries constantly to break down his reserve and draw him out of his reticence.
Shakara is an ancient stage character seen from very early times. Generally the brother of the king’s favourite concubine or a sort of wife not properly married to him, he is usually rather unsavoury and traditionally portrayed as full of pride, folly and vainglory, throwing his weight around on the strength of his connection to the monarch.
In the first four acts of Mrchchakatikam, which presumably form the Charudattam of Bhasa, Shakara is drawn mainly as a contrast to Charudatta—his wealth as against Charudatta’s indigence, his pride and brashness as against Charudatta’s essential humility and laid-back behaviour, his folly and vanity as against Charudatta’s refinement and nobility. This serves greatly to enhance the personality of Vasantasena who spurns Shakara’s advances despite his power and pelf and chooses the indigent Charudatta for his honesty, compassion and refinement.
In Bhasa’s Charudattam Shakara comes through essentially as an ineffectual and capricious bully quite comical with his literary and linguistic gaffes rather than a serious villain. He constantly spouts mangled mythology by mixing up the stories of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, throwing in garbled history as well for good measure. Most of his sentences are a lot of nonsense with the use of wrong verbs like ‘I hear the scent of the garlands but I cannot see the tinkling of the ornaments because my nose is filled with darkness.’ Shudraka retains this quirk of Shakara and we have him saying things like ‘being eaten up by the thief’ and being ‘looted by the demon’ throughout the play. The gaffes may be genuine slips although at times he seems to indulge in them deliberately, especially when he is clowning or bullying people like the Buddhist monk in the garden or talking down to his inferiors like Sthavaraka Cheta. Such gaffes may well be termed ‘Shakarisms’ forming chronologically very early examples of inappropriate usage of words for which we have later examples in English like spoonerism, malapropism and so on.1
Occasionally there occur flashes of unconscious humour, a mixture of wit and idiocy in Shakara’s speech, such as, ‘I can kill a hundred women, I am really valiant’ (The Clay Toy-Cart 1.28); ‘such a big crowd to see this beggar Charudatta being led to his death! How many more people there may be when noble aristocrats like me are being led to the gallows’ (ibid. X 29).
It is this somewhat distasteful clown and bully of low wit that Shudraka transforms into a consummate villain possessed of rare cunning and a total absence of a sense of right and wrong, who deems murder a suitable punishment for any woman who spurns his advances and punctures his inflated self-importance. No moral qualms deter him from foisting his own crimes on an innocent man. But when the game is up and the tables are turned Shakara reveals himself to be a shameless coward and readily grovels for mercy in order to save his own skin.
The main function of the Vidushaka in early drama must have been to provide comic relief to the audience in the course of a long play. He is ugly to look at and given to chattering in Prakritam. In short, he acts the clown. Invariably the other characters make fun of him. However, he is close to the hero, who confides in him and seeks his help in solving problems of a romantic nature. The Vidushaka, more often than not, fails in the mission entrusted to him, in spite of making diligent efforts, which constitute a comedy sequence in the play.
The Vidushaka for some unknown reason is always a brahmana who speaks, uncharacteristically enough, Prakritam, and is often heard using abusive language with the queen’s attendants. The use of abusive language seems to have been a distinguishing trait as his very name indicates and it is for that reason perhaps he is made to speak Prakritam as it would be sacrilege to use swear words in Sanskrit, the devabhasha. In any case the queen’s servants and the courtesans, at whom his words are traditionally directed, would not understand him if he spoke Sanskrit. In the time of Ashvaghosha and Bhasa, the Vidushaka is a regular character on the stage except in plays derived from the epics.
In Mrchchakatikam, however, the playwright effects a transformation of this ancient character. He retains, of course, his comic nature by showing a fondness for eating, by the obtuseness that he exhibits on various occasions, the bricks that he drops in delicate situations, and by his jokes that border on the coarse. At the same time though he comes across as a totally wholesome personality whose love, loyalty and devotion to his friend Charudatta are boundless. He willingly runs errands for him; he is always at his side cheering him up in his black moods of despondency over his poverty; and he is ready to follow him in death as he has been following him in life.
Maitreya in Mrchchakatikam is a vibrant character deeply involved with the fortunes of his dear friend and feels a deep concern for him. He is desperate to wean Charudatta away from Vasantasena; he keeps on and on about how greedy the courtesans are as a rule, how they suck their customers dry before throwing them out, although he is grudgingly aware that Vasantasena is as unlike a typical courtesan as anything can be. Yet he leaves us in no doubt as to where his loyalty, respect and admiration lie; it is Dhuta all the way till the very end of the play.
The Vita is yet another ancient stage figure. Although other playwrights have used him in various minor ways, it is in Mrchchakatikam that he attains full development. A Vita is a man of many parts. He is a poet, he is also skilled in music and in general well versed in art and culture. Above all he is a man of the world, familiar with the ways of the courtesan. He lives generally under the patronage of a courtesan or any man of wealth, acting as their companion. A.B. Keith feels that the Vita is rather like the parasite of Greek drama. There are two Vitas in Mrchchakatikam, one employed by Shakara and the other a companion of Vasantasena.
The two are different from each other. Shakara’s Vita has the more developed personality of the two and acts as a sort of foil to his master, with his Sanskrit speech, his erudition and culture, his irony and his bravery seen in contrast to Shakara’s Prakritam, his ignorance and crudity, his high-handedness and arrogance born of his connection to the king and his infantile cowardice.
Vasantasena’s Vita has a briefer part to play; it begins and ends in the fifth act. We see him only when he accompanies Vasantasena to the house of her lover Charudatta. His role seems to be a more formalized one as the conversation between the two takes the form of an exchange of verses in Sanskrit composed on the spot on the untimely rain that is impeding their progress. The purpose of this exchange seems to be to bring out Vasantasena’s remarkable linguistic skills, as though to tell us what an unusual courtesan she is and how she is in every way equal to Charudatta.
The Vasantasena–Vita relationship seems to be on a different footing. He is no doubt Vasantasena’s good friend and well-wisher, and teacher as well, but plays all these roles with a degree of formality unlike the realistic part played by Shakara’s Vita. At the end of the journey when the time for parting is at hand the Vita, the good friend that he is, advises her on how she ought to conduct herself in her lover’s house—all strictly formal and according to the rulebook. It is only the emotion that he displays at the parting that appears a little out of character and makes one wonder if he is not a little in love with her himself.
Among the minor female characters, Dhuta, the wife of Charudatta, is a person of great dignity with a well-developed sense of duty. The playwright does not tell us what she thinks of Charudatta having an affair with the courtesan. Whatever may have been in her mind, she rises to the occasion remarkably and her stature is greatly enhanced when she offers the precious ratnavali, the only piece of good jewellery that she has left, to Maitreya to help her husband get out of a demeaning situation.
As a dutiful Hindu wife of the middle ages, she utters not a single word of criticism against her husband for associating with a courtesan. Yet as Charudatta’s lawfully wedded wife she stands aloof from Vasantasena when the latter spends a night in her house. She refuses to take back her ratnavali on the plea that it is a gift from Charudatta to Vasantasena and she herself has nothing to do with it. In any case as far as she is concerned, Aryaputra, her husband, is her greatest ornament and that she does not need any other piece of jewellery. Throughout the play Dhuta maintains the distance between herself and Vasantasena.
Sanskrit scholars often take objection to the casualness of the style in which the play Mrchchakatikam is written. Meaningless sounds are included too often to fulfil the demands of metre. There are compounds formed not exactly according to the rules of Paninian grammar. Sometimes even ungrammatical forms of words are used. All these quirks in the language nevertheless contribute to form a unique style which is racy and to the point.
It has also been charged that the work lacks elaborate descriptions of any kind which are considered the hallmark of a good poet. There are sometimes repetitions of ideas in the verses like in those that describe the unseasonal rains in the fifth act.
To offset these ‘faults’ as it were, there are quaint descriptions that make for unusual partial similes such as ‘yagnopavitam is a non-pearl, non-gold jewel of the brahmana’; or ‘the veena is a gem not risen from the sea’.
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However, when all is said and done, when all the pros and cons are discussed, the fact remains that Mrchchakatikam is a gripping play which sustains the interest and attention of the audience with its clever and suspenseful plot that not only entertains but also informs. This is perhaps why this play feels so modern in its sensibilities and its nuanced treatment of characters, their quirks and their quandaries. And this is perhaps what accounts for its continuing appeal centuries after it was first composed.
(This play has been rendered and performed on the stage both in India and abroad, and has also been adapted for the screen at least three times, including the highly acclaimed Bollywood film Utsav [1984], directed by Girish Karnad.)